ON COLLEGE BASKETBALL.

A 2nd chance at life

Marquette assistant Trey Schwab was as good as dead from a blood clot following transplant surgery. His survival is an inspirational story

December 16, 2004|BY SKIP MYSLENSKI.

MILWAUKEE — Trey Schwab sits behind his desk and says:

"I was dead. I had no pulse, no blood pressure, no nothing."

He offered up these words casually, with no emotion, as if he were describing another day in the life. But there is nothing ordinary about his tale, nothing commonplace about this man.

As a special assistant to Marquette basketball coach Tom Crean, Schwab works in an arena where an athlete's courage often is extolled. But few ever have manifested greater courage than his. In this season of holiday cheer, we are surrounded by stories that lift the spirits. But few stories are more uplifting than Schwab's.

"There's no way he should be with us today. It's a miracle," Marquette point guard Travis Diener said. "You get around people like him maybe once in a lifetime . . . [and] you learn never to take anything for granted.

"You don't get down if you have a bad day, if you don't play as well as you want or you don't do well in school one day. There are always bigger things. He lost his life for what, an hour? You look at things like that and try not to let little things bother you."

He basically shut down for a while.

"But it wasn't my time to go," Schwab said. "That's the only way you can describe something like what happened. To be able to live through that and come out of it with no damage to your brain or your organs, the doctors sure can't explain it."

Saturday, when Marquette plays Arizona at the Bradley Center, Schwab will be on the bench helping guide the Golden Eagles after all he has endured the last three years.

In late 2001 he was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung disease. A double transplant was his only hope for survival and as he awaited his turn and a compatible donor, his condition steadily deteriorated.

Yet throughout his struggles, he carried on without complaint, aided eventually by a portable oxygen tank. That was how he got through the 2002-03 season, which ended with Marquette in the Final Four, and how he managed when last season opened.

A year ago, when the Golden Eagles traveled to Madison to face Wisconsin, he still was healthy enough to make the trip. But a month later, when Marquette came south to play DePaul in mid-January, his lungs were functioning at less than 20 percent and he was forced to stay home.

"I was really sick there at the end," he remembered.

Without a transplant, he had less than a year to live. But then came the call he had long awaited. He underwent surgery Feb. 17 at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics.

The operation was a success, and he was recovering as expected. On March 1 he was scheduled to be moved out of intensive care and into a private room. This was a milestone he'd been anticipating. He had not eaten solid food for more than two weeks and was looking forward to it.

But that morning, as he took a short walk around the ICU, a 16-inch blood clot lodged between his heart and his new lungs.

"It blocked all but a trickle of flow out of his heart to his lungs," said Dr. Robert Love, his transplant surgeon.

This is when Trey Schwab was effectively dead.

For 53 minutes, as doctors furiously administered CPR, he had no pulse, no blood pressure and, it appeared, no hope. A brain can go without oxygen for only six minutes before irreversible damage occurs. But when Schwab finally was brought back to life, he was still whole.

"People can survive this kind of event if they go to the operating room with some kind of cardiac function," Love said at a news conference three weeks later. "People don't survive if they go to the operating room with no cardiac function, which is really the condition Trey was in. So it's really quite miraculous that he's here. . . . I really can't explain something supernatural like this, even with all the expertise we have here."

Schwab, 39, considers it a series of miracles.

"I had a miracle in the first place getting a good donor, getting a good pair of lungs," Schwab said. "Then I had a second miracle to live through the complications with the blood clot and the second surgery. Then to come through all of that and be able to get back to work and have my wits about me, obviously, that's one more miracle. So I had a lot of miracles in that three-week span."

Less than a week after he returned from the dead, Schwab was well enough to sit up in his hospital room, eat a Popsicle and watch on TV as the Golden Eagles defeated Louisville. Seventeen days later, as they awaited the start of their NIT game with Boise State, he was wheeled into the Bradley Center and down the hallway to their locker room.

Before his initial operation, he had written a note to the team and asked the players to play on long enough for him to get back for a game. They had, and he was returning to thank them.

"But he wouldn't come into the locker room in a wheelchair," Crean recalled. "He got out of it and walked in, which is another example of his toughness."